A Dynasty of Dealers: John Smith and Successors 1801-1924.

£250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Printed for presentation by Charles Sebag-Montefiore to members of the Roxburghe Club. 250 copies are available for sale. ISBN 978 1 901902 10 5 A Dynasty of dealers: John Smith and Successors 1801-1924 is a study of the London art market for Dutch and Flemish picutres in the nineteenth century, based on 364 unpublished letters between the art dealer John Smith, his sons and their customers. His clients included the Prince Regent (later George IV), the Duke of Wellington, Lords Bute, Lansdowne and Northwick, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Charles Bagot, Ralph Bernal and William Beckford, as well as members of the Baring, Hope and Rothschild banking families, and the firm dealt in works by artists such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Rubens. For around seventy years John Smith’s firm acted as a leading London dealer, and had curatorial responsibility for Lord Ellesmere’s celebrated collection of pictures at Bridgewater House, St James’s, a role that lasted for three generations, and a lesser role for Lord Ashburton’s collection at Bath House, Piccadilly, which lasted for as many. Smith was also the author of the pioneering Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters, nine substantial volumes covering forty-one artists, published between 1829 and 1842. As Nicholas Penny writes in the Foreword, the book ‘publishes the remarkable correspondence of John Smith and the family firm of art dealers that he established. The authors provide a learned and sympa

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